Webinars and online events

The theme for this years’ European Day on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse is ‘Learning from victims and survivors of childhood sexual violence to inspire policy change’.

This is an opportunity to highlight the importance of engaging with, and learning from, victims and survivors.

To mark this day, the Safer Young Lives Research Centre at the University of Bedfordshire will be hosting an online event to share some new resources we have developed that are relevant to this theme.

These resources are informed by an international research study exploring the potential outcomes associated with the participation of young survivors of child sexual abuse and exploitation. We will share some of the key findings and outputs from the study, including a series of practitioner briefings and our comic, ‘Seeing Things From Both Sides’.

For any questions, please contact: claire.cody@beds.ac.uk

Please note there are limited spaces available.

REGISTER HERE

The webinar is taking place on Friday 17th November 2023 from 10 - 10:45am (GMT).

The SYLRC are pleased to be part of this event hosted by the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action (CSJCA) at Durham University, exploring participatory research. A note from the hosts:

"Participatory research approaches draw on various traditions but often share the ethos of creating useful knowledge for positive change with people and through democratic processes. Centre for Social Justice and Community Action (CSJCA) at Durham University has been promoting participatory research at the university, national and international levels for more than 12 years, and is seeking to explore the future of participatory research with community and academic researchers in our annual events.

Our Centre is very keen to bring together participatory researchers at Durham University and in the community to explore challenging issues in collaborative and co-produced research.

Following the keynote speech of Prof. Michelle Fine, there will be parallel interactive workshops to explore innovations in Participatory Research in different disciplines, including a panel co-facilitated by the SYLRC's Young Researchers' Advisory Panel."

If you are curious to find out, come join the annual event of the Centre for Social Justice and Action on 29 November 2022, 12-3 PM via Zoom!"

For more information and to register, click here.

The Our Voices University Network (OVUN) held a webinar on 14th December 2022, 1 - 2pm GMT to explore the complexities around legally established minimum ages of consent to sexual activity as experienced by young people and those representing them.

Brief presentations addressed:

• Is the legal age of consent to sexual activity created to protect children against sexual abuse and exploitation, or to restrain children’s sexual autonomy?
• Are laws based on the dominant moral codes or on informed evidence of child development and child welfare?
• Do laws help or hinder those implementing the law in accounting for young people’s different developmental stages, and in balancing rights to protection and sexual autonomy?

To see the event flyer click here

The Our Voices University Network (OVUN) invite you to join an online interactive workshop on 29^th September 2 – 3:30 pm UK time which is all about youth advisory groups.

This workshop will bring together teams from:

• The University of Bedfordshire’s Safer Young Lives Research Centre and Young Researchers’ Advisory Panel (YRAP).
• The Global Early Adolescent Study and Global Youth Advisory Board, coordinated by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
• Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub, a collaboration led by the Universities of Oxford and Cape Town with one of the Hub’s Teen Advisory Groups.

Workshop participants will get to hear the perspectives of both youth advisors and the academic researchers they work with, as each ‘team’ gives a short presentation focused on a key challenge they have experienced from collaborating on research projects that explore adolescent health and wellbeing. For more information and to register, click here

EUPHA INJ, OVUN, WONCA Europe come together during European Public Health Week to discuss educational settings and community responses in relation to child sexual abuse, and in the broader theme of building resilient health systems. The event takes place on 20th May 2022 at 3pm CEST. For more information click here

A key topic of interest that emerged from scoping undertaken as part of the development of the University Network Children Challenging Sexual Violence (CCSV) is the need for standardised ethical guidance for doing participatory research with children and young people on sexual violence against children. 

In this webinar, members of the network, including Jenny Pearce, Elisabetta Biffi, Camille Warrington and Catherine Maternowska, share thoughts and examples from their practice to explore how existing guidance, which is predominantly informed by Western-centric protocols, may need developing for participatory research embracing issues facing low and middle income countries. 

This webinar was hosted on the 18th November, 2019 to mark the European Day on the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse. In the webinar Claire Cody and Silvie Bovarnick share findings from the Our Voices Too Youth Advocacy Project. As part of this project, the IC is working in partnership with three national NGOs in Europe: Different & Equal in Albania; the National Center for Child Abuse Prevention (NCCAP) in Moldova and ATINA in Serbia.

Each organisation is working together with young people to implement participatory advocacy activities in their respective countries. The IC worked with the partner organisations to design a toolkit for adult facilitators from these three NGOs to help them support young people (Youth Advocates), who are current and former service users, to design and plan an advocacy campaign on sexual violence against children. Throughout the process a team of researchers at the IC have been collecting data to capture the learning from this project.

In this webinar, held in collaboration with the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, we introduce our new International University Network to challenge sexual violence against children and share ideas with participants for future developments. Read more about the International University Network here. 

This will be the first in a series of case study discussions that will explore different ethical challenges that can arise in participatory projects.

This webinar introduces the Make-IT-Safe project and explores how young people got involved in preventing online abuse and exploitation.

During the webinar Stellit, an NGO based in St Petersburg Russia, share their experience of supporting the Youth Volunteer Movement "Do You Know the Way? Do it Your Own Way…"

To mark the first European Day on the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse, this webinar shared young people's views on preventing sexual violence. Findings from a series of consultations with children and young people affected by sexual violence in Albania, Bulgaria and England are explored.